Global Forward Capital

A new industry proving that digital connectivity and mental health can co-exist.

Digital Wellness

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 Muse is the developer of Muse headbands, brainwave-sensing devices designed to help users meditate and sleep. The company’s Muse 2 headband uses biometric sensors to track brain waves, pulse, body movements, and breathing. The company offers its headband for the price of USD 199.99 for the hardware only and USD 224.98 for hardware plus a 1 year app subscription. The company also sells a Muse S package that features the Muse 2 headband as well as sleep sensors. This package is priced at USD 299.99 for the hardware alone and USD 304.98 for the hardware and 1 year app subscription.
 
 
 
 
 In July 2018, Muse acquired Meditation Studio, a guided meditation app with over 70 teachers creating original content focused on alleviating stress, anxiety, and insomnia. Meditation Studio offers limited and basic content for free, and offers premium content such as monthly lessons on gratitude, leadership, sleep, stress, and anxiety management, and features such as night mode and playlists for USD 7.99 per month or USD 49.99 per year. As a part of the acquisition, Meditation Studio’s content was made available to Muse headband users. 
 
 
 
 
 In August 2022, the company, through its parent company Interaxon, raised USD 9.5 million in a Series C funding round led by BDC Capital, Alabaster, Export Development Canada. The funds were set aside to develop an integrated wellness membership model into its platform and carry out product development-related research on longitudinal tracking for changes in the brain. The company also planned to use the funds to expand its platform to third parties and invest in partnerships. 
 
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AI-based solutions for evolving digital threats

Next-gen Cybersecurity

<div>
 
 Snyk provides a platform for enterprises to secure their cloud-native and container applications which includes tools for developers that allow them to find vulnerabilities in their open-source and application codes used to develop cloud-native applications.
 
 
 Snyk intends to break even by 2024 and go public in the future.
 
 
 In June 2023, the firm 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19216">
 acquired cloud application observability platform Enso
 </a>
 for an undisclosed sum. Snyk planned to integrate Enso into its developer security platform, giving developers full visibility of their applications throughout the development lifecycle.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 As of January 2023, Synk served more than 2,500 customers globally. Notable customers include Asurion, Google, Intuit, MongoDB, New Relic, Revolut, and Salesforce.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In January 2023, the company 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/15958">
 secured an undisclosed amount
 </a>
 from ServiceNow. The funds were utilized to enhance its developer security platform.
 
 
 In 2022, Snyk achieved a 100% YoY increase in revenue and an over 130% increase in net revenue retention. It also reported that it tripled in size and its employee headcount rose from 400 to 1,200.
 
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Autonomous and connected technologies shaping the future of the auto industry

Auto Tech

<div>
 
 Mojio is a Canadian company providing cloud-based hardware and software solutions on a software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis to scale connected mobility services. Its connected car platform includes &ldquo;Telematics Engine,&rdquo; which powers connected vehicle services; &ldquo;Mobility Studio,&rdquo; which facilitates the integration of automotive data into mobile apps and connected services; &ldquo;Services Ecosystem,&rdquo; a network of third-party suppliers including Amazon Alexa, Allstate, Arrive, Bosch, Google Maps, and IFTTT to provide an enhanced user experience such as roadside assistance, vehicle maintenance, and parking reservations; and &ldquo;Intelligent Toolkit,&rdquo; a set of tools, framework, products, and services needed to understand, analyze, and monetize connected mobility data.&nbsp;
 
 
 
 
 Its mobile applications&ndash;Motion and Force&ndash;help manage the car ownership experience for consumer vehicle users and fleet management, respectively. In particular, Motion offers predictive vehicle maintenance alerts, fuel level, and nearby station information, live vehicle tracking, emergency response systems, roadside assistance, etc. As of 2019, its services were available for a monthly SaaS fee of around USD 10.
 
 
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 In December 2021, Mojio partnered with 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/117689">
 Audi
 </a>
 to design and develop Motion for Audi connect. As of March 2021, it had more than 1.2 million vehicles on its platform.
 
 
 
 
 The company also has partnerships with telecom companies such as Telus Corp., Deutsche Telekom, and its US subsidiary T-Mobile for the mobile network, and with other third parties such as ZTE to make the hardware. It also has partnerships with Bosch, to launch an IoT emergency response solution; RapidSOS, to enable real-time delivery of telematics data and insights to 911 in the event of a vehicle crash (May 2022); and Housecall Pro, to launch an integrated fleet management solution for home service businesses (March 2022). In September 2023, Mojio partnered with SkyBell, a provider of smart video doorbell technology, to jointly develop a new integrated video telematics solution.
 
 
 
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Platforms, apps, and cards to keep the corporate wallet in check

Business Expense Management

Veem offers a domestic and cross-border accounts payable (AP) and receivable (AR) platform. Its AP solutions include invoice data capture, automated approval workflows, payment execution, as well as payment tracking, reporting, and reconciliation. Veem supports payouts in over 70 currencies across more than 100 countries (as of December 2022) in several methods (Veem wallet, ACH transfers, checks, and cards). Veem also enables recurring and mass payments and can be integrated with several accounting platforms including QuickBooks, NetSuite, and Xero. The company charges its users a flat monthly fee of USD 14.99 (as of December 2022) and a per transaction fee that varies based on the payment method. Key customers and partnershipsVeem caters SMBs across several industries and had over 400,000 customers across more than 110 countries, as of December 2022. The company provides its services through partnerships with several payment infrastructure platforms including <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/30208">Crown Agents Bank</a>, <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/234571">Cross River</a> and <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/15247">Finastra</a>.

Travel Tech

<div>
 
 Hostfully offers two primary solutions for professional short-term rental property managers: The Property Management Platform and Digital Guidebooks.
 
 
 The Property Management Platform, which features a channel manager, central calendar, and mobile app, is designed to streamline the management of short-term and vacation rentals. It allows users to manage reservations across all properties and channels from centralized locations, handle payments, deposits, discounts, and refunds with integrated payment processors, and automate various communications such as reminders and check-in directions. The platform also provides an API for creating custom software workflows tailored to the business' needs. Integrations offered include that of accounting software, data tools, dynamic pricing tools, payment processing, and guest management systems, among others.
 
 
 The Digital Guidebooks product is a tool for conveying all necessary information about a property, from check-in to checkout. It includes detailed instructions, house rules, appliance guides, and personalized local recommendations. The guidebooks, which are compatible with any device, can be integrated with the Property Management Platform and automatically translated in over 16 languages. The company also offers a marketplace for upselling additional services and capturing guest email addresses for remarketing purposes. The guidebooks can be created, managed, and shared, either as a printout, a downloadable PDF, or a link optimized for any browser.
 
 
 In 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19966">
 July 2023
 </a>
 , Hostfully introduced an AI-powered itinerary planner, designed to help hosts offer personalized experiences to their guests by creating tailored itineraries based on guests' unique travel arrangements and preferences.
 
 
 Hostfully generates revenue via subscriptions, charging ~USD 200&ndash;1,500 for its property management platform, based on the number of properties added. Additionally, the company has freemium pricing plans for its Digital Guidebooks, with monthly paid plans priced between ~USD 10&ndash;2,500 based on the number of guidebooks purchased.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 Key customers include Beach Box, MadeComfy, and OSA Property Management. Notable partners include Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, and Stripe.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In May 2022, Hostfully raised USD 4 million in a seed funding round led by Disruption Ventures, with funding utilized to bolster product capabilities, including a native mobile app and multi-unit inventory handling, alongside the additional sales and customer success hires.
 
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Tools that streamline software development

DevOps Toolchain

Instabug is a mobile performance platform that provides tools for monitoring, identifying, and fixing issues in mobile applications. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company offers a suite of products including crash reporting, bug reporting, application performance monitoring (APM), and user feedback collection. Instabug's platform is designed to help mobile developers and engineering teams gain visibility into app performance, detect and resolve issues quickly, and improve overall user experience.
The company's SDK runs on over 2.7 billion devices, processing billions of mobile sessions annually. Instabug's technology captures detailed information about app behavior, including stack traces, device and network data, and user interactions. This allows developers to proactively identify and address performance issues, UI hangs, slow app launches, and other factors that may impact user perception of app quality. In 2021, Instabug processed 110 billion mobile sessions and helped customers resolve 4.2 billion issues.
Instabug's product suite has expanded to include features such as App Ratings and Reviews, which consolidates user feedback with performance metrics, and Session Replay, which provides visual replays of user sessions for enhanced debugging. The company also introduced Rollout Management to streamline and automate the app release process. Instabug takes a privacy-first approach, ensuring sensitive data is masked on users' devices.
In May 2022, Instabug raised USD 46 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners, bringing its total funding to USD 54 million. The company has been growing its enterprise customer base and expanding its capabilities to meet the needs of larger mobile development teams.
Key customers and partnerships
Instabug counts many Fortune 500 companies and top 100 apps on the app store among its customers. Notable clients include DoorDash, Verizon, IHG, ABInBev, Porsche, Qualtrics, Gojek, and Clubhouse. The company has seen significant growth in its enterprise customer base, which increased tenfold in 2021.
Instabug has formed strategic partnerships to enhance its offerings. In January 2023, the company partnered with IBM's Instana to integrate mobile app performance monitoring with Instana's observability platform. This collaboration allows customers to monitor mobile applications in Instabug while identifying backend-related issues in Instana. In May 2023, Instabug joined the Datadog Marketplace, integrating its mobile performance insights with Datadog's monitoring and security platform to provide a comprehensive view of mobile app performance alongside backend infrastructure metrics.

Building future-ready applications in the cloud

Cloud-native Tech

<div>
 
 Mezmo is an observability platform that offers logging and insights across cloud-native environments at scale.
 
 
 The Mezmo platform offers two primary features: Telemetry Pipeline, which helps users take control of their telemetry data and transform and route data to desired destinations, and Log Analysis, which is a log management platform that ingests, normalizes, and routes data to developers, enabling them to take action in real time.
 
 
 
 
 The Mezmo Exporter for OpenTelemetry enables users to ingest new log data from multiple sources.
 
 
 
 
 Mezmo offers these two products through separate pricing plans that are based on consumption and customer requirements.&nbsp;
 
 
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 
 
 Among Mezmo&rsquo;s customers are IBM Cloud, Sysdig, Lifesize, Asics, Lime, Klara, MANTL, 6 River Systems, Relatient, Better, Gradle, Rainforest, LiveRamp, Spin, and OnXmaps.
 
 
 
 
 Mezmo&rsquo;s cloud/marketplace partners include Red Hat, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, Render, and Heroku. Some of its technical integration partners are Github, Vercel, Cloudflare, PagerDuty, Circle.ai, Nightfall.ai, NGINX, Instana, Fastly, Zenduty, and Zeet. Mezmo integrates with Amazon Linux, Windows, CentOS, Kubernetes, Docker, Red Hat OpenShift, Syslog, Java, iOS, Webhook, and Sysdig.
 
 
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 
 
 Mezmo&rsquo;s latest funding was in December 2021 from a USD 50 million Series D round led by NightDragon.
 
 
 
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Bridging the gap between the human brain and computer

Brain-computer Interfaces

Muse is a Canadian company that manufactures brain-sensing headbands designed to enhance meditation and sleep. Their flagship product, the Muse S (Gen 2), is a wearable device that uses EEG (electroencephalography) technology to measure brain activity, heart rate, breathing patterns, and body movements during meditation and sleep. The headband provides real-time biofeedback through immersive audio cues, guiding users to achieve a calm and focused state during meditation or to fall asleep more easily.
The Muse S features sensors that detect brainwaves, heart rate, and breathing patterns, along with an accelerometer and gyroscope to track body movements. During meditation sessions, the headband translates the user's mental activity into guiding sounds, such as storms or peaceful weather, to help them maintain focus and calmness. If the user's mind wanders, the audio cues become more intense, prompting them to refocus.
For sleep tracking, the Muse S incorporates "Digital Sleeping Pills" (DSPs), which modulate audio cues based on the user's brain rhythms to facilitate relaxation and uninterrupted sleep. The accompanying Muse app provides detailed insights into sleep stages, duration, and quality, along with a sleep score and guidance for improving sleep habits.
Muse's products are designed to be comfortable and user-friendly, with rechargeable batteries and wireless connectivity. The company offers a premium subscription service that provides access to a vast library of guided meditations, sleep programs, and integration with third-party apps.

SHARE Mobility provides transportation solutions for companies. We fill open jobs and improve employee retention by helping companies provide transportation as a benefit. Turnkey Mobility-as-a-Service for  safe and sustainable transportation.

Hostfully helps vacation rentals companies earn more revenue and deliver a 5-star guest experience.  The property management software platform distributes listings to Airbnb, HomeAway, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor, and also automates operations including payments (Stripe) and accounting (Quickbooks). Hostfully's market-leading digital guidebook platform gives travelers local recommendations and essential property information. These help managers of 10,000 properties in 80 countries around the world make vacation rental travel smoother and more delightful.

Claira is an AI powered competency analytics engine that helps organizations understand their talent and hire better. Founded in 2020, Claira is headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States.

Babbly is building the world's largest data platform to help parents monitor and support their child's development. Our first product is a mobile app that lets parents track their baby's speech development using a video recording of their child.

openigloo is New York's first tenant review mobile application applicable both on Android and iOS. The digital platform connects the tenants and landlords of highly-rated buildings to support tenants and provide clarity to property rentals. openigloo provides landlord reviews and the information related to the property and landlord before signing the lease. The app allows searching for an address, accessing real-time city data, reading, and anonymously sharing rental experiences on apartments and landlords.

Datacy is a venture-backed company, revolutionizing consumer insights by answering the “why” behind consumers’ shopping decisions, while empowering consumers to control and monetize their data. Datacy's unified consumer insights platform transforms online behavior into revenue growth for CPG digital commerce. With Datacy, you gain access to a bespoke online consumer community, connecting and analyzing billions of data points. This allows you to truly understand the factors behind online growth. Datacy deciphers the intricate journey of online consumers, unraveling the web of clicks, views, and purchases to reveal the patterns and preferences that influence online shopping decisions.

Localized is a talent tech company focusing on early-stage recruitment in growth markets. Companies subscribe to access virtual career fairs and year-round recruitment and universities and talent hubs join to provide students and alumni with access to industry experts and employers. We work with universities in the Middle East, North Africa, India, China and the United States. With 85% of the world's population in emerging markets, our partners know that the future of early-stage talent recruitment is global and online.

Wedge Networks is a cyber security software vendor specializing in Real-time Threat Prevention.  With numerous patents, industry awards, including a Gartner Cool Vendor designation, and twice bestowed with Build-In-Canada Innovation awards, its products are distributed through MSSP, OEM, VAR and SI partners to end customers worldwide.  Wedge is headquartered in Calgary, Canada with international teams in the North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa regions. Real-time Threat Prevention is one of the most critical cyber defense requirements for the digital economy with enterprise security capacity being over-run by rapidly expanding security workloads as organizations shift to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and other cloud native applications.  With the cloud connected world seeing billions of new connected endpoint devices added, especially in areas such as smart cities, smart manufacturing, and other smart infrastructure, the network perimeter has now been extended to encompass anywhere these devices are located; further widening the security gap.   The ability for the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) to rapidly roll out real-time threat prevention services, and to adapt and deliver end-to-end protection as and when needed, is a key challenge in this cloud connected world, especially for MSPs, MDRs and other service providers.  Wedge’s leadership in this area allows us to form important and strategic partnerships with players who are movers and shakers in this digital transformation and enables increased growth for these partners.  Today, Wedge’s products prevent advanced security threats for tens of millions of endpoints spanning more than 22 countries. Our technology platform, WedgeARP™, has the deepest visibility of network data in the industry, possessing an unmatched ability to defend against malicious attacks that are undetectable with shallow inspection techniques. It delivers the highest real-time performance of orchestrated security services through a software implementation that is portable to all x86 servers. Trained with nearly 1 billion threat samples, its automated and continually-learning embedded artificial neural network can detect never-before-seen malware in milliseconds. WedgeARP™ represents the present and future of how much-needed security services can be delivered, from the cloud core to the ever-expanding network edge, to help reduce the security gap.  Supported by a world class software product team in Canada, it allows enterprises, governments, telecommunications providers and critical infrastructure operators to achieve real-time prevention of advanced threats; and enables Wedge’s distribution partners to increase their Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and reduce customer CHURN.

Veem is a payment service provider that helps simplify the way businesses send and receive funds. It offers a platform that enables small businesses to send and receive payments in local currency. Using blockchain as a payment rail, the company eliminates the need for intermediary banks, reducing costs for small- and medium-sized businesses. It converts the sender’s funds into bitcoin, selling the digital currency at an exchange for the desired currency of the recipient. Aldo Carrascoso and Marwan Forzley co-founded the company in 2014 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Mezmo, formerly LogDNA, is an observability platform to manage and take action on your data.  It ingests, processes, and routes log data to fuel enterprise-level application development and delivery, security, and compliance use cases.

Magalix is a cloud security enabler, leveraging security-as-code and compliance-as-code, to embed security at every stage of the development lifecycle - from code to cloud.  Magalix Platform offers capabilities such as: monitoring security postures, enforcing security guardrails, real-time monitoring,  analytics, and more.

Cysiv combines all the elements of an advanced, proactive, threat hunting SOC with a managed security stack for hybrid cloud, network, and endpoint security, delivering them to enterprises and Managed Service Providers as a 24/7 SOC-as-a-Service with simple, usage-based, monthly billing.

Snyk empowers the world’s developers to build secure applications and equip security teams to meet the demands of the digital world. Its developer-first approach ensures organizations can secure all of the critical components of their applications from code to cloud, increase developer productivity, revenue growth, customer satisfaction, cost savings, and an overall improved security posture. Snyk’s Developer Security Platform automatically integrates with a developer’s workflow and is purpose-built for security teams to collaborate with their development teams. Snyk is used by 1,200 customers worldwide today, including industry leaders such as Asurion, Google, Intuit, MongoDB, New Relic, Revolut, and Salesforce. Snyk is recognized on the Forbes Cloud 100 2021.

Affectiva is on a mission to humanize technology. An MIT Media Lab spin-off, Affectiva created and defined the Emotion AI category. Built on deep learning, computer vision, speech science and massive amounts of real-world data (over 9 million face videos analyzed in 90 countries), Affectiva’s technology can detect nuanced human emotions, complex cognitive states, activities, interactions, and objects people use. In automotive, Affectiva’s in-cabin sensing AI is enabling leading car manufacturers, fleet managers and ridesharing companies to build next-generation mobility that adapts to complex human states for enhanced safety and personalized transportation experiences. Affectiva’s technology is also used by 25 percent of the Fortune Global 500 companies to test consumer engagement with ads, videos, and TV programming.

Scalable, secure and hardware-agnostic, Mojio is the platform and SaaS solution provider of choice to build, launch and scale connected mobility services. Founded in 2012, Mojio has growing teams in Silicon Valley and Vancouver, and counts some of the world’s biggest brands as customers, investors and partners, including Amazon, Bosch, Deutsche Telekom, Microsoft, T-Mobile and Vivint. Mojio’s platform, apps and services deliver a smarter, safer and more convenient car ownership experience for the global driving community. With over 15 billion miles of driving data gathered from more than a million vehicles, Mojio’s big data analytics framework uses machine learning to generate actionable insights, unlocking the next generation of revenue streams for companies throughout the automotive value chain. Learn more at moj.io.  Force by Mojio is the ideal GPS fleet tracking solution for small businesses that rely on their vehicles to get the job done. Learn more at forcebymojio.com

Turbonomic is an Application Resource Management (ARM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) software provider based in Boston, MA. Turbonomic provides businesses with ARM software that simultaneously optimizes the performance, compliance, and cost of applications in real-time. Turbonomic identifies and executes the right actions at the right time at every layer of the application stack. Applications get the exact resources they need, continuously and in real-time.

Lief Therapeutics is a medical device developer whose goal is to revolutionize at-home care for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. The device teaches users how to control the body's natural stress response through vibratory biofeedback exercises, allowing them to measure heart rate and breath with medical accuracy in order to control stress.

Instabug is a computer software company that offers services for mobile app developers to help them in testing their applications. It delivers real-time contextual throughout the application's life cycle that helps mobile application developers to detect bugs and errors on their application. The company was founded in 2014 and headquartered in California, United States.

Muse has developed brainwave-controlled computing technology and applications that converts brainwaves into digital signals. They have created a hardware and software platform technology that converts brainwaves into digital signals that are fed into a computer. InteraXon then provides consumers with applications that use these brainwaves to perform activities such as meditation, gaming, ADHD assistance, and many others to come. The company was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario.

Global Forward Capital is a multi-stage investment firm specializing in cybersecurity and global markets. Founded in 2017 as Trend Forward Capital, the firm was renamed in 2023 to reflect the expansion of the firm’s mission to include global private equity investments, the opening of headquarters in Singapore and the team’s unique experience in global cybersecurity markets.

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